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In the wildest, wackiest, most unpredictable season in Canadian Football League history, how could television numbers possibly be down?

In the first season to feature four different teams in the division finals from the year before, how could the average audience for the CFL on TSN and RDS drop to 701,000 from 876,000 in 2010?

Mark Cohon, at the annual commissioner's news conference Friday, outlined a league in which 50% of the games were decided in the last three minutes compared with 49% the year before and 40% in 2009.

Attendance was up 2.4% with more than two million fans watching games in person to provide the league with 60-65% of its revenue.

Revenue from sponsor partnerships was up 16% from a year ago and 29% from 2009.

"Our TV ratings were down. How do we explain this?" Cohon said.

The answer, he suggested, was that the Saskatchewan Roughriders sucked and their legion of fans around the nation dialled out on them this year.

OK, he didn't phrase it exactly like that.

"Teams in Toronto and Saskatchewan struggled this year," was how he put it.

"The Lions getting off to a 1-6 start didn't help in Vancouver."

There's also a small flaw in the new ratings system, he suggested.

"Manitoba and Saskatchewan only have 60 households in the sample size," he said of a most passionate area of the nation for the CFL.

"Last year we were up 100% on the year before and hockey up 50% (under the new system).

"We remain a very strong property in Canada, second only to hockey."

And the Grey Cup is second to none.

What will the numbers be Sunday for the 99th Grey Cup game between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and B.C. Lions?

The 98th Grey Cup in Edmonton last year boasted an average audience of 6.2 million while the 97th Grey Cup in Calgary had an average audience of 6.1 million, ranking them as among the most watched television programs of any kind in the country.